Best Storage Solution for me?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
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  • Background:

Hey all. So I am in the process of redoing my home storage solution, with the plan of setting it up so that there is a very minimal/no chance of data loss to occur. I am looking for a solution which offers the smallest possibility of data corruption (bit rot, primarily), along with the easiest recovery of HDD data when failure does occur (either that being the host O.S, or the storage drive).

  • My specs:

-Xeon 1620 (will be upgraded to a 1650 V2 in the coming months)
-64GB DDR3 ECC Registered RAM (not running in registered mode, AFAIK. Need to do some testing on that still)
-HP Z420 Motherboard
-Corsair HX650 (80+ Gold, OEM is Seasonic. Will be replacing all output electrolytic caps inside with low-ESR Panasonic/Nichicon/Rubycon caps, for added stability)
-120GB boot SSD, with a 160GB HDD in raid 1 (idc about performance loss)
-Many 2TB drives at my disposal, however, only want my array to have a max of 4 HDD’s per array. I also have many raid cards and PCIe slots to hold it all.
-Host OS (hosts many other unrelated VM’s, hence the CPU upgrade): Windows 8.1 Pro with HyperV

  • My Plan:

Run a Windows 8.1 Enterprise VM inside of my Win 8.1 Pro Host OS, with EITHER 2x raid 1 setups OR raid 6.

OR

Run FreeNAS inside of my Win 8.1 Pro Host OS (with lots of RAM dedicated to it, obviously), with EITHER 2x raid 1 setups OR raid 6, OR ZFS

For both choices, the entire drive will be passed through to the VM, and not controlled by the host O.S. What gets shared out to the network will also be controlled by the VM.

Long question, I know. Anyway, which choice should I go with, which offers the smallest possibility of data corruption, along with the easiest recovery of HDD data when failure does occur (either that being the host O.S, or the storage drive).

Thanks :slight_smile:

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Bump?

3

From what I understood the files will either way be on one location, in a vm on your host computer. I believe that if you want to minimise data loss you need to worry more about the 1 2 3 rule than the raid/os of the file server.

Let us know how it went!

4

So I guess it doesn’t really matter, on whether I choose to use FreeNAS or Windows for my central file server? Both are equally likely to suffer bit rot? Also, what drive config is best for my situation?

5

How much stuff do you have on your file server atm?

Both windows and freenas can be used to make kickass file servers as long as they are set up right. It all comes down to what are your needs, your budget and which os makes you more comfortable to troubleshoot when shit goes wrong :smile:

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